Latest news with #GeneSiskelFilmCenter
Chicago Tribune
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Column: Doc10's Anthony Kaufman on why documentary film are imperiled — and why they'll survive
The 10th edition of Doc10, Chicago's annual long weekend of nonfiction filmmaking from well, everywhere, opens with something from here: 'Move Ya Body: The Birth of House,' a Sundance Film Festival premiere earlier this year. It examines a dubious origin story with a delayed happy ending, about Comiskey Park's notorious, literally inflammatory Disco Demolition night in 1979 and how a Major League Baseball-sponsored joke turned into a riot — and lit the fuse for the global phenomenon of South Side Chicago house music. A 10-film showcase can do only so much, yet Doc10 does a lot each year, taking the pulse of our world as seen through the cameras of mavericks on a mission. In this year's crop, one film was shot under fire in Ukraine after the Russian invasion ('2000 Meters to Andriivka'), while another follows the nerve-wracking trail of a whistleblower targeted for assassination ('Antidote'). Closer to home, you'll find a cautionary tale of a Florida woman who's both perpetrator and, in her eyes, victim ('The Perfect Neighbor'). Doc10's home base remains the Davis Theater in Lincoln Square and, for two screenings on May 4, the Gene Siskel Film Center. Preceding the main lineup, several free community screenings pop up this week around Chicago. Doc10 is presented once again by the nonprofit documentary funding and producing organization Chicago Media Project. And head programmer Anthony Kaufman is responsible for what you'll be seeing. The New York City native is also a senior programmer at the Chicago International Film Festival; an adjunct professor at DePaul University specializing in documentary film; and a longtime film critic and journalist, focusing on nonfiction work. In recent years, Kaufman, 53, has written for Indiewire and other outlets about the stiff headwinds nonfiction filmmakers face. Netflix, Hulu and others now favor a fatty, low-protein diet of true crime and celebrity profile quickies. In the public sector, meantime, the Trump administration has targeted the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for elimination. 'It's hard, and maybe not sustainable,' Kaufman told me in our conversation the other day, on his back patio near Northwestern University. He's married to associate professor Ariel Rogers, who teaches in the Northwestern School of Communication's Radio/Television/Film department. On the other hand, Kaufman says: 'It's never been sustainable. Yet these filmmakers somehow find a way.' The following has been edited for clarity and length. Q: At a pretty bizarre time in American life and politics, and with stories of global conflicts with no endings in sight, what can the documentary genre give us? A: One thing documentaries can do, I think, especially documentaries about current crises, is give us the long view. Or the deep view, the one we're not getting from sound bites, or YouTube videos, or the administration's statements. When you see a film like '2000 Meters to Andriivka' that puts you on the front line, in Ukraine, you understand what's happening. You understand the stakes. You get a deeper, more substantive view that is not manipulate-able by propaganda. In this case, the filmmaker (Mstyslav Chernov, who will introduce the May 4 screening at the Siskel Film Center) was on the front lines with the soldiers, in the middle of firefights, risking his life. With Doc10, over the last decade, we've built an audience that's passionate about so many issues. And they're eager to hear the filmmakers come and talk about them. Q: Is it my imagination, or are we living in a moment when every single day, there's another five potential subjects for a full-length documentary, crying out to be made? A: That's how it feels, all right. There's a major event that happens, like the Luigi Mangione assassination of the UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, and two weeks later, you see the documentary on Hulu. Maybe terrible and certainly sensational, but there it is. Q. Of the 10 documentaries you picked this year, who's working in more unconventional storytelling form? A: I'd say two, in different ways. One is 'Mistress Dispeller,' made by the Chinese American filmmaker Elizabeth Lo, who we're bringing in (for the May 4 screening). In the film, she goes to China and tells the story of these people who are hired to break up husbands cheating on their wives with their mistresses. Nothing is fiction, nothing is staged, but the film puts us in real time with the mistress dispeller, working with this husband and wife. She's been hired by the wife to bring her husband back, to convince him to end this affair. And she's also working on the mistress to convince her to leave this married man. So it feels like a drama, a fiction film. The other one is called 'Ghost Boy,' by the director of 'Room 237,' Rodney Ascher, who works with a really innovative use of reenactments. It's about a 12-year-old who fell into a coma for three years and woke up with 'locked-in syndrome.' He couldn't communicate with the outside world, but he was fully conscious. And with these surreal visual reenactments, the film puts you in his headspace during that time. It's using fictional storytelling techniques to tell this guy's story. Q: When a documentary hits a moment right, is it just lucky timing or something more? A: It can be both. You remember 'Won't You Be My Neighbor?', the Morgan Neville doc (from 2018, a huge hit) about Fred Rogers? That could've been made any time, or released any time, but it came out in the middle of the first Trump administration, at a point when America really needed the reminder that goodness and compassion were good things. Through sheer coincidence of timing, it was exactly the right moment. This year, it may be 'The Perfect Neighbor' (picked up for streaming rights by Netflix) that does something similar. It cuts to the bone of the current racial conflicts and questions, battles, really, over diversity, equity and inclusion, but in an indirect way. Q: What are documentary filmmakers up against now that they weren't a few years ago, in terms of getting their work out into the world? A: Filmmakers and documentary producers I've talked to started to worry about shifts a year or two ago. Before that shift, it was a kind of golden age, when a lot of streamers put a lot of money into documentaries. Netflix, Hulu, Amazon. It was a kind of golden age, right during COVID. Then the streaming companies realized what was doing well, according to their algorithms. True crime and celebrities. That's what got the eyeballs. And now, virtually all of the attention is on that. And everything else, they leave out. This has not helped documentary filmmakers who don't want to make a movie about Katy Perry in space. So that's been a struggle. And now we have the gutting of the NEA and the NEH, which a lot of filmmakers and funders relied on for making their work. The threat to public media, to PBS, is a threat to both the financing and the release of documentary filmmaking. It'll be catastrophic for independent documentaries and independent media, period, across the country. Q: As someone whose life's work is so tied to this art form, do you ever give up hope? A: The whole ecosystem is changing, and it's hard. And maybe not sustainable. But I take heart from two things. One is, it's never been sustainable (laughs). And the second thing is: Artists create, no matter what. Someone told me — maybe it's a famous quote, I'm not sure — that optimism is a political tool. (Futurist Alex Steffen said something like it: 'Choosing and voicing optimism is a powerful political action.') I think we need to take heart from that. It's disadvantageous for us to absorb defeatism. Think of all the great art, the great films, that came out of crisis and political oppression. Film and art find a way. And documentary filmmakers are not a privileged bunch. They've never needed much. Unlike the fiction film industry, which is far more capital intensive, documentary filmmakers are, by nature, scrappy and determined and not really pressured by the market. They tell stories because they feel like they have to. And as you said, every day, there's another incredible documentary subject, waiting for the right filmmaker. We'll see what we see, a year or two from now.
Chicago Tribune
17-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Review: ‘Killer of Sheep,' a poetic-realist masterwork, returns sharper than ever
Of all the memorable feature film debuts, Charles Burnett's 'Killer of Sheep' may be the freest from contrivance, disinterested to a lovely degree in conventional story machinery or in anything more than moments in time and the daily lives of people Burnett knew in his Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts. Like Burnett himself, whose family relocated from Mississippi to LA, many of these people feel the pull of the place they knew, in this place they have come to know. That neither here-nor-there feeling is everywhere in 'Killer of Sheep.' Burnett shot it on black-and-white 16mm film in the early 1970s, then released it in a very small way in 1978. The velvety 4K digital restoration of what began as Burnett's UCLA thesis project runs April 18-24 at the Gene Siskel Film Center. It's 80 minutes of evanescent yet concretely specific beauty, from a great American artist. There is a narrative framework, spacious enough to make the movie Burnett had in him. It co-stars the streets, vacant lots, alleys and interiors he knew well, captured a few years after the deadly Watts clash between citizens and police. The media of the time called it the Watts riots; the people closer to the bloodshed called it, and call it, the Watts rebellion. None of this is addressed directly in 'Killer of Sheep.' Yet in his traversing of the urban landscape here, often wordless, Burnett is paying attention to the past in every piece of the present. The family at the core of the story consists of Stan (Henry G. Sanders), who works nights at the slaughterhouse indicated by the movie's title. It's a wearying job; his wife, played by Kaycee Moore, feels pushed to the margins of their increasingly distant life together. Moore, who died in 2021, was (like Burnett) a key member of the L.A. Rebellion filmmakers movement. And in its poetic-realist eye for environment as well as character, 'Killer of Sheep' reminds us there's more than one way for artists to rebel. The film spends time with this family's children and other kids, chasing freight trains; battling each other with sounds, fistfuls of parched dirt and busted plywood shields; and, in one of many casually perfect compositions, a ground-level view of three neighborhood kids leaping from building to building. Dropping in on this conversation or that confrontation, Burnett gathers some evidence of what's eroding this family's stability, much of it economic. At one point, Stan's offered the chance by a local fixture to make a little money as an accessory to a murder, which he declines. This life does not make things easy; Stan's struggles between paychecks weigh heavily, though the way this filmmaker makes films, the heaviness is conveyed with a magically light touch. Burnett, now 81, went on to make some wonderful work with A-list actors: 'To Sleep With Anger,' 'Devil in a Blue Dress' and the recently recirculated 'The Annihilation of Fish' among them. In 'Killer of Sheep,' so much of his talent was right there, at the start, in the way the locations and compositions envelop the nonprofessional cast members without competing with them. Burnett has said he made his film partly as a corrective to the attempts of working-class 'gritty realism' his white, privileged fellow UCLA film school students were turning out in the 1970s. For decades, 'Killer of Sheep' stayed nearly out of sight, tied up with some complicated and costly music-rights issues resolved only recently. Burnett's fantastic soundtrack selections, underscoring intimate moments and raucous ones, can now be heard in their best-yet audio quality and their fully legal glory. Dinah Washington, Paul Robeson, Earth, Wind and Fire, George Gershwin, bluesman Arthur 'Big Boy' Crudup — every choice makes sense, and adds a fuller dimension to these people's lives. The film ends not with an ending, really, but a humane acknowledgment of how much of life feels like a daily string of middles, pulling us along. 'Killer of Sheep' — 4 stars (out of 4) No MPA rating (some language)
Chicago Tribune
31-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
‘Misericordia' review: A funeral mourner sparks a tiny French village's erotic roundelay
Under wraps or busting out all over, inconvenient yearning is everywhere in the films of Alain Guiraudie. And like most of his characters, the French writer-director likes to keep his options open. No one genre suits him. Now at the Gene Siskel Film Center and the Landmark Century Centre Cinema, 'Misericordia' begins with a homecoming, proceeds to a funeral, expands to other corners of a not-so-sweet-little-village, throws in a murder and a cover-up, and concludes with elements of a deadpan sex comedy. It's easier to get at what 'Misericordia' isn't than what it is. And that makes it all the more interesting. The story begins with Jérémie, around age 30 with an uncertain future, falling back into his past. He returns to his former village of Saint-Martial for the funeral of the town baker. Jérémie worked as his apprentice a decade earlier. At the cozy hillside home of Martine, the baker's widow, Jérémie settles in for a stay of undetermined length. Early on, we see one framed photo in particular that catches Jérémie's eye: the baker in his prime, in a Speedo, at the beach. Casually, Martine refers to an intimate connection between her late husband and his apprentice. Connections like that maintain the film's low boil of erotic intrigue. Martine's hot-tempered son, Vincent, a childhood frenemy of Jérémie's, lives nearby. He does not relish the upcoming funeral's conspicuous outsider worming his way back into Saint-Martial. Vincent and Jérémie, it's implied, were more than just frenemies when they were teenagers. The bad blood between them eggs the men onto violence, tinged with physical need. Elsewhere, 'Misericordia' lets a comically glaring moment of side-eye do what words cannot. Most of it comes from the town abbot who, in frequent scenes set in the nearby woods, always seems to be drifting into view with his basket of precious mushrooms, whenever Jérémie is near. The rhythm and plotting of 'Misericordia' subverts expectations, not with story twists but with a tonal game of three-card monte. Guiraudie's best-known work, the 2013 movie 'Stranger by the Lake,' blended a more selective array of genre elements more smoothly; his new film, nuttier, more free-ranging, sets its queer male gaze inside genre boundaries drawn and re-drawn on the fly. More than once, this or that villager sneaks into Jérémie's bedroom at night, with something urgent to say. It's as if a murder story changed its mind and turned into a Joe Orton farce, taken at a peculiar half-speed. Some will buy it, some will not. But if life can pull switcheroos on us, movies can, too. The cast finesses the material without a misstep as the pent-up townsfolk orbit around cryptic, magnetic Jérémie, played by Félix Kysyl. Portraying Martine, whose jealousy-tinged affection for her houseguest becomes genuinely touching, Catherine Frot is the X-factor that makes 'Misericordia' a whole, rather than merely parts looking for a whole. As the village abbot never far from the woods, or from Martine's little dining room table, Jacques Develay manages the trick of utter simplicity in his motives and line readings. Nobody in this village can quite figure out why the alluring tabula rasa, Jérémie, has a hold on everybody. They only know desire works in mysterious ways. Misleadingly, this filmmaker's brand of suspense has often been labeled 'Hitchcockian,' because there are sometimes corpses to be hidden and alibis to be faked. In 'Misericordia,' on the other hand, there's a touch of Hitchcock's atypical lark 'The Trouble With Harry' in its straight-faced handling of strange developments. The trouble with Jérémie isn't that he's dead, even though his homecoming involves not one but two casualties. Is he bad? Misunderstood? A tender soul in hiding? A portrait in opaque omnisexuality, as adaptable as a zipper? Since 'Misericordia' has no interest in being only one kind of movie, it seems strange to expect a single motive or simple explanation from anyone in it. 'Misericordia' — 3.5 stars (out of 4) No MPA rating (nudity, some language and violence) How to watch: Now playing at the Landmark Century Centre Cinema, 2828 N. Clark St., and Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St. In French with English subtitles.
Chicago Tribune
25-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
This year's Doc10 film festival opens with the house music documentary ‘Move Ya Body'
A Chicago tale beginning with the infamous Comiskey Park Disco Demolition night and ending with the global rise of house music as sweet revenge opens the 10th edition of the nonfiction film festival Doc10 on April 30. 'Move Ya Body: The Birth of House Music' will be followed by 10 more documentaries, concluding on May 4, most screened at Lincoln Square's Davis Theater with two at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Programmed by film journalist, critic and Doc10 co-creator Anthony Kaufman (also a programmer with the Chicago International Film Festival), the boutique documentary showcase operates under the auspices of Chicago Media Project, a nonprofit organization focused on a wide array of social-impact projects. CMP's website leans into ideals and phrases such as 'under-represented' and 'multiple points of view' — in effect a rebuke to the current presidential administration. 'When American democratic norms, the rule of law and basic long-held facts are under attack,' Kaufman said in the festival announcement, Doc10 is 'a vital place for people to come together and experience people's true stories and actual struggles.' Five of the 11 films premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival. Among them, in addition to 'Move Ya Body,' are 'Antidote' — a nerve-wracker about journalist Chirsto Grozev's life-or-death odyssey following reporting on Russian leader Vladimir Putin's so-called 'poison program' — and '2000 Meters To Andriivka,' highly regarded as an urgent account of a Ukrainian platoon's trek through a deadly patch of forest in order to liberate a key village under Russian siege. The full calendar of documentaries, including guest filmmakers, plus other festival events and ticket information, can be found at Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
Chicago Tribune
21-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
‘The Annihilation of Fish' review: A rare James Earl Jones film, restored, returns for a victory lap
'The Annihilation of Fish' would be pretty much unimaginable, if it weren't here, now, a generation after its disappearance. It barely got into production in 1999, even with James Earl Jones heading the cast. A Toronto International Film Festival screening later that year revealed the film's singular and divisive qualities, which led to one willing distributor to take on the release. Then a harsh Variety review, deriding its lack of commercial oomph, killed the deal and the movie hid away, in limbo. Until now. Director Charles Burnett has admirers in high places, for the best possible reason: He's a pioneering poet of Black American life, and a singular cinematic talent working on his own wavelength, mixing his own mixture of joy and despair and tragedy and human comedy. Burnett's 1978 independent classic 'Killer of Sheep,' a beautiful, battered page out of Los Angeles and Watts history, will never cease to cast its spell. Within the Hollywood studio system, despite its cautious oversight, Burnett made 'To Sleep With Anger' (1990), driven by Danny Glover's finest-ever performance, as well as the Walter Mosley/Denzel Washington noir 'Devil in a Blue Dress' (1995). Burnett kept working, in film and television, fiction and nonfiction. This brings us to the unicorn of a project 'The Annihilation of Fish.' Thanks to a recent restoration funded by Mellody Hobson and George Lucas via their Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation, this bracingly cockeyed comic romance has dropped in from the past, with Lynn Redgrave and Margot Kidder in memorable supporting roles. It opens in Chicago Friday at the Gene Siskel Film Center and the Wayfarer Theatre in Highland Park. At first sight the three leading characters share little beyond a Los Angeles address, and a sense of dislocation. Jamaican American Obediah Fish has spent the last 10 years in a New York City psychiatric hospital; he's beset by an demon visible only to him, and this demon (Hank, by name) engages Fish in wrestling matches on a regular schedule. Relocating to L.A., Fish lands in the boarding house owned by Mrs. Muldroone (Kidder), who, like Fish, is a solo act, having lost her spouse years ago. She's a weed tender. Everyone has their coping mechanisms in this comic construct, protected the characters from everyday reality. This surely applies to the Puccini-loving Poinsettia (Redgrave), whose love of grand opera and Puccini's 'Madama Butterfly' in particular goes beyond mere fandom. She spends much of her time communing with the late composer as if he were alive and her special beau. Not long after Fish moves to the boarding house, Poinsettia steps off a Greyhound bus from San Francisco, laden with suitcases, and promptly becomes Fish's neighbor. Leading with flamboyant hostility and more than a little racism, this blowsy blur of a woman — in Redgrave's skillfully hammy hands, she's like every Mrs. Clackett in every production of 'Noises Off' put together — needs tending. A courtly soul, Fish is there for her, picking her drunken self up off the hallway floor after her latest night on the town. This leads to a friendship over games of rummy. (Akin to 'The Gin Game,' which Jones performed on Broadway, much of 'The Annihilation of Fish' takes place over cards.) He cooks a Jamaican feast for her. And then love blooms, in between Fish's bouts with the unseen demon from his past, with Poinsettia serving as referee. The demon fades from view. But can Fish live without his adversary? The screenplay comes from writer Anthony C. Winkler, who also wrote a short story by the same title. 'The Annihilation of Fish,' purely as material from which Burnett made his film, requires a certain amount of forgiveness and faith. Its coyness can get sticky. But the actors reward every ounce of audience faith. Once Fish and Poinsettia lower their guards, the movie settles and Burnett's touch is beguiling, all the more for his sly intimations of the supernatural — at one point, Fish tosses the invisible demon Hank out his second-story apartment window, and we see the leaves on the tree shake and sway — and his soulful embrace of these broken but unbowed lives. The movie's a rom-com at heart, but there is no other one like it. It's also as much of an L.A. story as every other Burnett film made there, and it does not shy away from 1999-era political issues, from President Reagan's de-institutionalization of countless mentally ill patients, to never-not-topical American subjects of race and prejudice. 'In South Africa, they used to put a white woman on bread and water for a year for kissing a Black man,' Fish says, after Poinsettia plants one on his kisser. Her response: 'Piss on South Africa.' 'The Annihilation of Fish' — 3 stars (out of 4) MPA rating: R (for some sexual content) Running time: 1:48 How to watch: Starts March 21 at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago ( and Wayfarer Theatres in Highland Park (
